Distant dreams
Perspectives on the Fnac Photographic Collection
With a text by Nathacha Appanah
Curation: Fannie Escoulen, Laure Augustins
Rencontres d’Arles
July 6, 2026 – October 4, 2026
Opening hours: 9:30 AM – 7:30 PM
“What are the stories told by photos made of? Do they have ingredients that change over time—the grain of the years, the light that yellows and sometimes bursts into spangles, the edges that soften like the characters, the hidden details that emerge?
Do they have, like books, the ability to unfold within us, to speak to us as if they existed for our eyes alone? Do they patiently wait for us to find out, ultimately, how they resemble us, how they are the mirror of our sorrows and our hopes?”
Nathacha Appanah,
Nos rêves lointains (Distant Dreams), Gallimard, 2026.
From its inception, Fnac was driven by its founders’ commitment to photography, assembling one of the most significant corporate photography collections in France in 1978. Spanning nearly a century in the history of the medium, the 1,800 prints that make up the collection are held at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce.
This exhibition offers a new reading of this collection. Through one hundred images and across several decades, it leads us to the outer reaches of the territories explored by photographers, into the strength of their connection to the landscape and their encounter with “the other, at once near and distant”.1
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